331–340 of 385 posts
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> When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.
Logistics workers aren't stack ranked, so that's a completely different problem
When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…
I feel like that's my problem as well in the company I work for (a well-known multinational, but not FAANG). I have a good compensation (although nowhere near the levels of FAANGs), yet I feel a little bit burned out.
If they didn't pay so well, I would have have left and taken a sabbatical (or two) to recover and rethink my life. And probably I would even return - and it might be more productive for all of us in the end. But I don't want to leave the golden cage because of the money, so I trudge along. It's weird how it is a perverse incentive. (And I wonder that it seems to be even worse for my coworkers who moved from another country here, and have now family dependent on this particular job.)
I think we are conditioned to take the money, instead of quality of life, because we worry about the modern neoliberal precarity, uncertainty about the future. Mark Blyth theorizes that the precarity might be bigger issue for most people than social inequality.
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How common is it for a candidate to be able to get offers from multiple FAANGs? I would imagine it isn't common, though I could certainly be wrong. The FAANG engineers that I know personally all seem to have cracked FAANG with a lot of difficulty, and claim that odds are they would fail if they had to re-interview for the same position.
Common among the cognitive elites, but the rest of us are lucky to get one. For me, Amazon was the one. And the fact that people think the bar is lower (and therefore I’m stupid) has made me cry myself to sleep before.
- you aren't defined by who your employer is - your intelligence isn't defined by who your employer is - you can't control what other people say or think about you - you're worth a hell of a lot more than what you do or what you make per year (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually) - life is random, do the best you can and don't hurt yourself doing so
At the risk of sounding morbid, we're all just apes on a flying rock trying to figure out what existence means to us. Reach out if you need help, there's nothing wrong with that.
Stay safe my friend.
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> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are…
It has been known for a while that there is a link between leadership and severe mental health issues [1]. Unfortunately this is how a lot of organisations are being built and how they are fluorishing. And the higher the position, the worse it is [2]. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniesarkis/2019/10/27/seni...
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Really!!! I am surprised to hear this. I always thought that Google is akin to "Chocolate factory" for programmers where programmer is the king and each and every decision is made by programmers. In my circle, Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the ultimate status of "you made it in life". Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard. In my opinion, they are at least 5-10x…
> programmers where programmer is the king and each and every decision is made by programmers Programmers at Google make no decisions. The only people 'making decisions' are the product owners and project managers. > Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard. A hard coding interview is not a valid metric on how good a place is to work. > Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer bad…
1. Genetically (i.e. your brain just works that way)
2. Luck into it
3. Iterate towards it (continuously)
The whole concept of "get job X and now I'm done" doesn't really fit well into any of those. A job could be a good iteration or you could get lucky and have it turn out to be a wonderful team/position/whatever, but the likelihood of your plan being "I need to do x" and then you do x and are then happy seems immensely unlikely. Like Samuel Johnson said, "Life is a progression from want to want, not enjoyment to enjoyment."
When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…
Your friend could switch jobs, then use his salary to buy Amazon's stock :)
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> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this, a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's li…
The poor fellow at Amazon can always go to Zillow or Microsoft not really the same as deaths of despair here.
Depression, despair etc are illogical narrowing our frames of minds and not being able to see any out. Kind of like getting stuck with a coding problem until you walk away and take a break, except you can't think of a way of walking away. (Or your "way" may manifest itself as psychosis or self harm.)
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I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.
I have given this feedback for a person at Google who made fewer than five commits in a year, each with just a handful of lines. The lines were good, so it wasn't about the quality of the work.
I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to com…
that's very similar to my experience. i swapped managers about a year in and my second manager put me on a PIP. except that it wasn't really a PIP, it was just him saying "i'm putting you on a PIP." -- I didn't know the difference until I had left. A friend in HR told me (after I quit) that managers do this to try to get more performance out of people. If you're on a PIP, HR will be involved. Also, the best C++ coder…
On your second example, this is where having senior technical people in the calibration room is really important. The key there is ensuring that said technical people know about the work before they are in the room. It is really difficult to change outcomes after the fact. You can't expect them to defend something they don't know about.
When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…
You're right that those engineers would jump ship: their primary reason to stay (pay) evaporates into thin air. But more importantly, if Amazon wants to keep them, they have to do one of two things: issue more stock, or compensate with better cash salaries. Both of those solutions further impact the stock price. Paying more cash reduces free cash flow...the main determinant of Amazon's obscenely high P/E ratios. Issu…